LLVM Embedded Toolchain for Arm is built and tested on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
The Windows version of LLVM tools is built on Windows Server 2019 and lightly tested on Windows 10. Windows package provides runtime libraries built on Linux, because of their limited Windows support.
Building and testing on macOS is functional but experimental.
The build requires the following software to be installed, in addition to the LLVM requirements:
- CMake 3.20 or above
- Meson
- Git
- Ninja
- Python
- QEMU (for running the test suite, so optional)
On a Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS machine you can use the following commands to install the software mentioned above:
$ apt-get install python3 git make ninja-build qemu
$ apt-get install clang # If the Clang version installed by the package manager is older than 6.0.0, download a recent version from https://releases.llvm.org or build from source
$ apt-get install cmake # If the CMake version installed by the package manager is too old, download a recent version from https://cmake.org/download and add it to PATH
$ pip install meson
On macOS, you can use homebrew:
$ brew install llvm python3 git make ninja qemu cmake
$ pip install meson
Some recent targets are not supported by QEMU, for these the Arm FVP models are used instead. These models are available free-of-change but are not open-source, and come with their own licenses.
These models can be downloaded and installed (into the source tree) with the
fvp/get_fvps.sh
script. This is currently only available for Linux. By
default, get_fvps.sh
will run the installers for packages which have them,
which will prompt you to agree to their licenses. Some of the packages do not
have installers, instead they place their license file into the
fvp/license_terms
directory, which you should read before continuing.
The installer for the cryptography plugin requires a graphical display to run:
it cannot run in a pure terminal session such as you might start via SSH. Also,
it will prompt for a directory to install the plugin into. You should enter the
pathname fvp/install
relative to the root of your checkout. The installer
will automatically append a subdirectory FastModelsPortfolio_11.27
to the end
of that, and respond with a warning such as 'Directory [...] not found (but in
patch mode). Continue installation?' Say yes to this prompt, and continue
clicking 'Next' until installation is complete.
For non-interactive use (for example in CI systems), get_fvps.sh
can be run
with the --non-interactive
option, which causes it to implicitly accept all
of the EULAs and set up the correct install directories.
If you have previously downloaded and installed the FVPs outside of the source
tree, you can set the -DFVP_INSTALL_DIR=...
cmake option to set the path to
them.
Testing with FVPs is disabled by default, but QEMU tests will still be run, and
all library variants will still be built. Testing with FVPs can be enabled by
setting the -DENABLE_FVP_TESTING=ON
CMake option if you have installed the
models as described above.
To build additional library variants, edit the CMakeLists.txt
by adding
calls to the add_library_variant
CMake function using existing library
variant definitions as a template.
To build additional LLVM tools, edit the CMakeLists.txt
by adding required
tools to the LLVM_DISTRIBUTION_COMPONENTS
CMake list.
The toolchain can be built directly with CMake.
export CC=clang
export CXX=clang++
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -GNinja -DFETCHCONTENT_QUIET=OFF
ninja llvm-toolchain
To make it easy to get started, the above command checks out and patches llvm-project & picolibc Git repos automatically.
If you prefer you can check out and patch the repos manually and use those.
If you check out repos manually then it is your responsibility to ensure that the correct revisions are checked out - see versions.json
to identify these.
export CC=clang
export CXX=clang++
mkdir repos
git -C repos clone https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project.git
git -C repos/llvm-project am -k "$PWD"/patches/llvm-project/*.patch
git -C repos clone https://github.com/picolibc/picolibc.git
git -C repos/picolibc am -k "$PWD"/patches/picolibc/*.patch
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -GNinja -DFETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_LLVMPROJECT=../repos/llvm-project -DFETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_PICOLIBC=../repos/picolibc
ninja llvm-toolchain
ninja check-llvm-toolchain
After building, create a zip or tar.xz file as appropriate for the platform:
ninja package-llvm-toolchain
The LLVM Embedded Toolchain for Arm can be cross-compiled to run on Windows. The compilation itself still happens on Linux. In addition to the prerequisites mentioned in the Installing prerequisites section you will also need a Mingw-w64 toolchain based on GCC 7.1.0 or above installed. For example, to install it on Ubuntu Linux use the following command:
# apt-get install mingw-w64
The MinGW build includes GCC & MinGW libraries into the package.
The following three libraries are used:
Library | Project | Link |
---|---|---|
libstdc++-6.dll | GCC | https://gcc.gnu.org |
libgcc_s_seh-1.dll | GCC | https://gcc.gnu.org |
libwinpthread-1.dll | Mingw-w64 | http://mingw-w64.org |
The libraries are distributed under their own licenses, this needs to be taken into consideration if you decide to redistribute the built toolchain.
To enable the MinGW build, set the LLVM_TOOLCHAIN_CROSS_BUILD_MINGW option:
cmake . -DLLVM_TOOLCHAIN_CROSS_BUILD_MINGW=ON
ninja package-llvm-toolchain
The same build directory can be used for both native and MinGW toolchains.
- Depending on the state of the sources, build errors may occur when the latest revisions of the llvm-project & picolibc repos are used.
See patches directory for the current set of differences from upstream.
The patches for llvm-project are split between two folders, llvm-project and llvm-project-perf. The former are generally required for building and successfully running all tests. The patches in llvm-project-perf are optional, and designed to improve performance in certain circumstances.
To reduce divergence from upstream and potential patch conflicts, the performance patches are not applied by default, but can be enabled for an automatic checkout with the APPLY_LLVM_PERFORMANCE_PATCHES option.
When working on library code, it may be useful to build a library variant without having to rebuild the entire toolchain.
Each variant is built using the arm-runtimes
sub-project, and can be
configured and built directly if you provide a path to a LLVM build or install.
The default CMake arguments to build a particular variant are stored in a JSON
format in the arm-multilib/json/variants folder, which can be loaded at
configuration with the -DVARIANT_JSON
setting. Any additional options
provided on the command line will override values from he JSON. -DC_LIBRARY
will be required to set which library to build, and -DLLVM_BINARY_DIR
should
point to the top-level directory of a build or install of LLVM.
(The actual binaries, such as clang
, are expected to be in
$LLVM_BINARY_DIR/bin
, not $LLVM_BINARY_DIR
itself. For example, if you're
using the results of a full build of this toolchain itself in another
directory, then you should set LLVM_BINARY_DIR
to point at the llvm
subdirectory of the previous build tree, not the llvm/bin
subdirectory.)
For example, to build the armv7a_soft_nofp
variant using picolibc
, using
an existing LLVM build and source checkouts:
cd LLVM-embedded-toolchain-for-Arm
mkdir build-lib
cd build-lib
cmake ../arm-runtimes -G Ninja \
-DVARIANT_JSON=../arm-multilib/json/variants/armv7a_soft_nofp.json \
-DC_LIBRARY=picolibc \
-DLLVM_BINARY_DIR=/path/to/llvm \
-DFETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_LLVMPROJECT=/path/to/llvm-project \
-DFETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_PICOLIBC=/path/to/picolibc
ninja
If enabled and the required test executor available, tests can be run with
using specific test targets:
ninja check-picolibc
ninja check-compiler-rt
ninja check-cxx
ninja check-cxxabi
ninja check-unwind
Alternatively, ninja check-all
runs all enabled tests.
As well as individual libraries, it is also possible to build a set of
libraries without rebuilding the entire toolchain. The arm-multilib
sub-project builds and collects multiple libraries, and generates a
multilib.yaml
file to map compile flags to variants.
The arm-multilib/multilib.json
file defines which variants are built and
their order in the mapping. This can be used to configure the project directly
For example, building the picolibc variants using an existing LLVM build and source checkouts:
cd LLVM-embedded-toolchain-for-Arm
mkdir build-multilib
cd build-multilib
cmake ../arm-multilib -G Ninja \
-DMULTILIB_JSON=../arm-multilib/json/multilib.json \
-DC_LIBRARY=picolibc \
-DLLVM_BINARY_DIR=/path/to/llvm \
-DFETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_LLVMPROJECT=/path/to/llvm-project \
-DFETCHCONTENT_SOURCE_DIR_PICOLIBC=/path/to/picolibc
ninja
To only build a subset of the variants defined in the JSON file,
the -DENABLE_VARIANTS
option controls which variants to build.
E.g, -DENABLE_VARIANTS="aarch64a;armv7a_soft_nofp"
only builds the two
variants of aarch64a
and armv7a_soft_nofp
.
If enabled and the required test executor available, tests can be run with using specific test targets:
ninja check-picolibc
ninja check-compiler-rt
ninja check-cxx
ninja check-cxxabi
ninja check-unwind
Alternatively, ninja check-all
runs all enabled tests.
ninja check-<VARAINT_NAME>
runs all the tests for that specific variant.